Along with the shortage of energy and an increase in the environmental stress, industrial and institutional transformation, especially in energy saving and consumption reduction, has become a focus of the development of a country and the printing industry. Meanwhile, along with an increase in the requirements on quality and production efficiency, currently printing enterprises are facing a challenge from the production cost, and how to reduce the production cost has become an important issue for the printing enterprises. Green printing is a topic to which the printing service providers pay much attention. And correspondingly, an ink-saving technology associated with the green printing has become an important research project for a prepress process.
The ink may be saved by increasing an amount of a black ink and decreasing an amount of a color ink. Upon an ink-saving processing, the ink may be transferred more easily, a small amount of fountain solutions may be used to reach an ink-water balance, and the paper waste may be reduced. In addition, there may exist a great improvement in the drying and printing operations, and the yield as well as the printing efficiency may be enhanced obviously. It is able for a user, by easily changing an ICC profile, to adapt himself to various printer such as a commercial printer, a sheet fed printer and a newspaper printer, and to various printing conditions such as different papers and inks, thereby to ensure consistency and stability of the color for one or several printing devices.
Currently, some measures for ink-saving have been applied to the printing process. However, in the prior art, the calculation on the ink-saving amount is not accurate and efficient enough. Usually, a method of manually calculating the ink-saving data is used, and the following steps are executed by an operator:
(1) disabling an ink-saving parameter in a rasterizer processor that can convert files into bitmap files, and sending a file to the rasterizer processor;
(2) enabling the ink-saving parameter in the rasterizer processor, and sending the file to the rasterizer processor again;
(3) manually comparing two copies of the data obtained through the above operations using image processing software (e.g., Photoshop), and manually calculating the ink-saving amount for the file; and
(4) acquiring the quantitative data about an average ink-saving amount for each page according to the number of the files and the ink-saving amount.
However, the above mentioned method for acquiring the data about the ink-saving amount has some serious disadvantages. For example, it merely adapts to testing a single file, so it is impossible to meet the requirements of industrial production. There are great errors when bitmaps are compared with each other by using Photoshop and when the bitmap is converted into ink coverage according to the operator's experiences. In addition, the file needs to be manually submitted twice to the rasterizer processor, and merely the bitmap file processed with the ink-saving parameter is outputted actually. Due to the same file name, the operation of submitting the file twice may easily lead to confusion between the actually-output bitmap and the bitmap temporally generated to manually calculate the ink-saving amount, and as a result, an industrial accident may be caused.